Cannacord owes total of $3.7 million after earlier $2.5-million judgment
A senior investment banker who won a $2.54-million wrongful dismissal judgment against Canaccord Genuity Corp. has been awarded $798,4531 in partial indemnity costs — less than the elevated award he sought — after an Ontario court found that neither his settlement offers nor his employer's conduct cleared the bar for substantial indemnity costs.
Justice Paul Schabas of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice released the costs endorsement on May 5, 2026, following his Jan. 28 reasons for judgment in favour of Craig Warren, a former managing director in Canaccord's Toronto mining group who was terminated without cause in 2019 after 18 years of service.
The total amount Canaccord must pay Warren — combining the damages award, partial indemnity costs, and pre-judgment interest — comes to about $3,688,020.
Reduced damages award
Warren had made a written offer to settle on Jan. 20, 2025, seeking $2.7 million from Canaccord. When Canaccord paid Warren $221,427 in March 2025 — on the eve of the first trial date, purportedly for a pro-rated bonus — that payment reduced the damages ultimately awarded below the $2.7-million threshold in the original offer.
Justice Schabas noted that had the gross amount of that payment been included in his damages award, the total would have been $2,761,501, which would have exceeded the offer.
Warren also delivered an amended offer on Sept. 11, 2025 — four days before trial — adjusting for the March payment. That offer, at $2,478,572 in effective value, was beaten by the court's award of $2,540,073. However, under Rule 49.10 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, offers must be made at least seven days before trial to trigger an entitlement to substantial indemnity costs, according to the decision. The amended offer did not meet that requirement.
"Accordingly, the plaintiff is not 'entitled' to substantial indemnity costs from the date of either offer," Justice Schabas wrote.
Underlying wrongful dismissal judgment
In the Jan. 28 judgment, Justice Schabas found Warren was entitled to 21 months' notice — closer to his position of 24 months than Canaccord's submission of 16 — citing Warren's senior role as the only managing director in Canaccord's Toronto mining group, his highly specialized experience in metals and mining, his age of 52 at termination, and the challenges of finding comparable employment on a platform that could support his practice.
The central dispute at trial was how to calculate the bonuses Warren would have earned during the notice period. Justice Schabas rejected Canaccord's proposed approach of averaging Warren's last three years of bonuses — $665,000, $810,000 and $540,000 for fiscal years 2017 through 2019 — finding it failed to account for the economic conditions during the notice period. Instead, the court adopted a comparator approach, using the bonuses paid to a managing director who joined Canaccord's Toronto mining group two months after Warren's departure.
That period coincided with what Canaccord itself described as its strongest financial performance on record, including a once-in-a-decade bull market in mining in fiscal year 2021, when the Canadian Capital Markets Pool nearly tripled from about $57 million to $140 million.
Justice Schabas also found that Warren's bonuses in the years before his termination had been suppressed by the "dysfunctional" leadership of the mining group's Vancouver-based co-heads, Hirst and Eggertson — a dysfunction Canaccord's own senior management acknowledged. Internal emails showed that Canaccord's head of Canadian investment banking believed Warren was entitled to a $1.4-million bonus for fiscal year 2018, but that it had been "dialed back" to $960,000 by Eggertson, an amount described internally as "light relative to production."
Using the comparator and applying a bonus rate of roughly 20% of revenue, Justice Schabas awarded Warren bonuses of $868,524 for FY2020, $3,000,000 for FY2021, and a pro-rated $515,342.47 for FY2022, before deducting amounts already paid by Canaccord and Warren's mitigation earnings at Cantor Fitzgerald.
Pre-judgment interest stays at prescribed rate
Warren also sought pre-judgment interest above the prescribed 2.0% rate under the Courts of Justice Act, arguing that significant interest rate fluctuations over the six-plus years since his termination — from a low of 0.5% to a high of 5.3% — justified applying an average rate of 2.67%, which would have yielded $465,963.
Justice Schabas rejected that argument, finding that Warren had not led evidence of actual market interest rates, as required under Henry v. Zaitlen, 2024 ONCA 614. He noted that the Court of Appeal has held it is an error to equate "market interest rates" with the prescribed rates set under the Courts of Justice Act.
"While the prescribed rates have indeed fluctuated, they have not fluctuated to such a degree that there is a compelling rationale to depart from the rate set in 2019, which was 2%," according to the endorsement.
The court also dismissed Warren's submission that, as an experienced investment banker, he would have put the funds to better use had he received them sooner.
"This is simply a bald statement and is the type of statement, regardless of who makes it, that should be treated with considerable skepticism," Justice Schabas wrote, noting a similar argument had been rejected in Henry, where the party had at least submitted stock exchange growth tables.
Pre-judgment interest was fixed at the prescribed rate, resulting in a total of $349,492, inclusive of $24,363 in interest on the stub period bonus.
